Longer-form article from 1992, which talks about the history of the phone system and covers this event: https://stuff.mit.edu/hacker/part1.html https://stuff.mi

Longer-form article from 1992, which talks about the history of the phone system and covers this event: https://stuff.mit.edu/hacker/part1.html https://stuff.mit.edu/hacker/part1.html > On January 15, 1990, AT&T's long-distance telephone switching system crashed. > This was a strange, dire, huge event. Sixty thousand people lost their telephone service completely. During the nine long hours of frantic effort that it took to restore service, some seventy million telephone calls went uncompleted. > Losses of service, known as "outages" in the telco trade, are a known and accepted hazard of the telephone business. Hurricanes hit, and phone cables get snapped by the thousands. Earthquakes wrench through buried fiber-optic lines. Switching stations catch fire and burn to the ground. These things do happen. There are contingency plans for them, and decades of experience in dealing with them. But the Crash of January 15 was unprecedented. It was unbelievably huge, and it occurred for no apparent physical reason.